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Gadget Wars

Technology giants are making a big push to bring more hand-held devices to consumers at a faster pace, creating fresh ammunition in the cutthroat gadget wars. Apple, long seen as the innovator in smartphones, has been wrestling with an image problem lately. Samsung Electronics, meanwhile, is trying to sustain its momentum with the coming release of its next Galaxy phone.

Facebook Shows Off New ‘Home’ for Android

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg said at Thursday's briefing that Home was 'designed around people first,' instead of tasks or applications.

Reuters

Facebook Inc. is trying to rebuild the mobile experience— around itself.

The Silicon Valley company on Thursday unveiled new software for devices running Google Inc.’s Android operating system, called “Home,” that gives the social networking company’s content top placement on smartphones.

Instead of displaying a phone’s traditional menu of apps, Home takes over a handset’s cover screen—the first layer or images that appear when a phone is turned on—populating it with posts from a user’s news feed, photos and messages from friends.

Home will come preinstalled on a new smartphone from HTC Corp. and will be available April 12 to download from Google’s app store for use on other new Android phones. It represents Facebook’s boldest move yet to take a more central role in the mobile-device world—a play that should also help it sell more ads on smartphones.

“You’re going to be able to turn your Android phone into a great social phone,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, during a briefing at the company’s campus here. “It becomes the home of your phone.”

The software acts less like a single app than a collection of them stitched into the top layer of Android. Mr. Zuckerberg called it “a whole lot deeper than any other app.”

Upon turning on a smartphone, a user will see images from Facebook updates cover the entire screen, while pertinent text and icons of friends float on the top. Simple gestures prompt interactions with Facebook, such as a double tap to “like” a photo, or a swipe to move to the next post.

Home also features a tool called “Chat Heads.” It pops up small icons of friends when they send a Facebook or text message, which can be viewed when using another app. These also can be easily dragged, moved or pushed off the screen by the user, Facebook said.

The Home application also comes with a launcher, or a menu populated with a users’ favorite apps and basic Android apps. Key Facebook tools, such as photos, status updates and check-ins, are also embedded at the top of the launcher as buttons.

By taking center stage with Home, Facebook is trying to become the default application for users who need to complete basic tasks, such as sharing photos or sending messages to friends.

Based on Facebook’s data, the average mobile user interacts with the social network about a dozen times a day—but users check their phones’ cover screens about a hundred times or more over the course of a day. The more minutes a user spends digesting and sharing content on Facebook, the more opportunities the company has to push ads to that user.

The company said it is planning to eventually display ads in the so-called “cover feed,” but it is still working on that strategy. Facebook says it has more than 600 million users on smartphones.

Facebook’s announcement, which was widely expected, is the latest outgrowth of its yearslong effort to move its franchise from the Web to mobile devices. While the company had explored issues related to hardware design, people close to the company have said, Mr. Zuckerberg reiterated Thursday that developing smartphones would limit Facebook compared with working with a broad number of hardware partners.

Creating an actual Facebook-branded phone, he said, might net the company 10 or 20 million users, an insufficient amount for a social network of more than one billion.

The device shown at the event, the HTC First, comes preloaded with Home and was described as offering a deeper integration with Facebook’s software. It will be available on April 12 for purchase from AT&T Inc., priced at $99.99.

Facebook said Home also works on the HTC One X, HTC One X+ and forthcoming HTC One, as well as Samsung Electronics Co.’s Galaxy S III, Galaxy Note II, and forthcoming Galaxy S4. It flashed a slide at the event of additional handset makers and other partners that included Sony Corp., Qualcomm Inc., Huawei Technologies Inc. and Lenovo Group Ltd.

Mobile advertising has become a key growth driver for Facebook, which has more than 650 million mobile users. In the fourth quarter, mobile ad sales roughly doubled from the prior quarter to $305 million, making up about 23% of the company’s advertising sales. But Google has a big lead; while Facebook is expected to make nearly $1 billion on U.S. mobile ad sales this year, according to the research firm eMarketer, Google is on track to make four times that.

According to analysts, Home may certainly push users to spend more time on the service. But it could also backfire.

Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co., said the application should gain considerable traction among Facebook’s most ardent fans, but is less certain if casual users will find the experience compelling—especially if Facebook pumps too many ads on main screen. “They’ll have to do a lot more experimentation and tread carefully,” Mr. Sebastian said.

Others also wondered if users will feel comfortable sharing so much of their data, more messages, more photos, and more location-based information, with the social networking juggernaut. “Users don’t want more advertising or tracking, and Facebook wants to do more of both,”said Jan Dawson, an analyst at Ovum.

Throughout the presentation, Mr. Zuckerberg frequently described Home as one that was “designed around people first,” instead of tasks or applications.

The 28-year-old executive, who noted that he grew up with the Internet, said Facebook’s Home was an acknowledgment that people’s relationship with computing devices was rapidly changing from one focused on productivity or business to one centered around human connections. Home, he said, puts “people first, and then apps.”